Knowledge capture and transfer

Process & manufacturing industry can prevent downtime and rejection

Wednesday 17 April 2019

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As a business in the production or manufacturing industry, there’s one thing you want to avoid at all costs: downtime of your machine line or an interruption in your production process, for example because the quality of the final product is not up to par. In the past, businesses mainly had to learn from stalled production lines or rejected products in practice. Today, however, it is possible to take preventative measures with the help of smart software so that problems are either prevented entirely or – if they do occur –resolved as quickly as possible.

Recurring issues

“In practice, we often see that problems during production are detected, but not registered. As a result, the same issue occurs over and over again for different people. Everyone does their best to resolve the problem, but no one ever tackles the underlying cause. All they do is deal with the consequences,” says Wouter Schotborgh, co-director of ELICIT Online, a leading software and consultancy firm that actively focuses on recording and transferring knowledge in the process and manufacturing industry. “That’s a shame, because constantly taking ad-hoc measures prevents an organisation from improving its efficiency.”

Systematically mapping out knowledge

“It’s better to systematically map out the acquired knowledge pertaining to an issue on the production line and share it, along with a clear solution, with the relevant colleagues. This helps a factory or production company avoid downtime and subpar final products,” co-director Herman Ouwerkerk adds. Sometimes, things go wrong right at the beginning of the process. We regularly encounter organisations that have no idea what the problem could be.” “When we bring in our methodology and software, we can resolve the issue in no time. As a result, the company’s costs are reduced and its productivity and profits increase. I’ll reveal more about how we do that in our next blog post, titled ‘How do I improve my production process?’, says Wouter.